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Thursday, December 11, 2014

Vague Happiness

I've been thinking about my New Year's resolutions for next year for the last few weeks. It's been surprisingly hard. Making goals isn't particularly difficult, but making goals that I actually will do is a whole different thing.

So I've been thinking about what I want out of life, and that's pretty easy on a basic level.

I want to be happy.

Me being me, hit the books (and movies) and researched "How to be happy." Honestly you can skip all the reading I did and just look at this wikihow article if you want a cliff-note version. It even has pictures.

Most of them had stuff like "own yourself", "be positive", "be part of a community" or "follow your passions." The thing is I am trying to do those things, but I feel like each of those is a process in itself. Then I'm making subgoals for my subgoals, and that just gets annoying.

I decided that I'm taking a different approach. Most of my goals that I actually followed through this year was subconsciously this method. Which is...eliminate or rebrand things I don't like doing.

I hate cleaning so I'm working on getting rid of most of our stuff.

I don't like laundry, so Matt does it.

I don't like wasting my time on the computer, so I have a pile of library books and a craft on the table at all time.

I don't like being stressed over parenting. so I switched to RIE parenting.

I hate having too many things on my scheduled, so now I only have scheduled things on Friday.

I don't like stressing about money, so I'm working on our budget.

And you know what? I feel pretty satisfied about my life this year. Last year I was so tired, stressed, and irritable. Now I'm so much happier. I have more time to do the things I like to do. In order to prep for my goal settings for next year, I wrote down everything that I don't like to do and made goals to fix or rid my life of them.

So goals we are working on for next year.

Reduce the amount of junk food we eat.

Reduce the amount of garbage our family produces.

Get the dishes under control.

Bike again. :) (I'm so excited for spring)

Tighten up our budget.

Help our appearance match how we see ourselves.

I'd

That's what I got so far. Matt and I were talking about them the other day and I think he's on board with most of them. It's so much easier when we work as a team.

So how do you set goals? And what do you think about all of these vague happiness equations?